Random Recordings of Mental Meanderings

I’ve been running Winblows ME on my home computer for more than long enough – over 7 years – and I am getting tired of the crashing, the programs/companies that don’t support it anymore, and everything else that is wrong with Winblows. It’s time to get a new operating system.

I did look at upgrading to XP, or even Vista. However, there is at least a small problem, not the least of which is that they are Microsoft products. The problem is that most of the hardware I have, save my monitor, speakers, and the new video card that I bought, is incompatible with newer versions of Windows, and I really don’t feel like dropping a few coins for a new sound card, CD burner, video camera, printer, digital camera, and scanner. And all that on top of dropping several hundred dollars for a new operating system? What’s wrong with just installing a new operating system that can still use all the hardware I already have?

Windows doesn’t work that way, so I am forced to look at other operating systems – i.e. Linux.

A friend of mine has ubuntu installed on his computer at home, so I decided to download it and try it. That’s the beauty of Linux – you can test-drive it on your system to make sure it works, before you actually install it. How’s that for nice? And if you don’t like it – you aren’t stuck with it! I wonder how far Microsoft would be if they used that marketing method? They probably would not be in business right now.

But I digress. I did a test run with ubuntu. It’s amazing that an operating system can install itself on a RAM drive, and run more smoothly than Windows ever did. It did take a minute for it to start up, but it looked better already. I have to say, though, that the brown and orange motif are not for me. Another thing that I didn’t like is that after an hour or so, it made my monitor squeal like a bitch. I mean, it was emitting this high-pitched squeal that was not only annoying, but it would not stop. So that didn’t impress me. It also froze up a few times. Primarily, it uses the Gnome desktop, and I really can’t say that I’m the biggest Gnome fan. I prefer KDE. While ubuntu was a definite step up, it wasn’t for me.

So then, I decided to look at Mandriva again. Years ago, when I was first looking at Linux, I favored Mandrake Linux. That was morphed into Mandriva due to copyright issues. I went to the website, but it wasn’t readily apparent that you could test-drive it. I didn’t bother downloading it.

I searched further, and found DistroWatch, which reviews different Linux distributions. I noticed that PCLinuxOS had the largest number of hits, so I figured I’d look into it, even though I had never heard of it. It turns out that it is a derivative of Mandriva, and is very will reviewed. All the reviews I read about it were positive, and the few bugs that people experienced were easily fixable.

I downloaded it and am test-driving it now. I like it. It works very well, was easy to set up, and having had it run for close to three hours now, it still hasn’t given me any real problems. There were a couple of times it seemed to freeze, but that was just a website causing it to stall as the site loaded. All the hardware and software that I have tried so far are working quite well. It even plays DivX movies without installing the codecs – although there is the plugin issue with Firefox, because DivX hasn’t created a plugin that works in Linux yet. Downloading and playing movies from stage6 could be a problem, but there are workarounds.

Overall, I like PCLinuxOS, and I think I’ll take the plunge and install it. Finally, to be free from Microsoft, viruses and spyware!